


Reason to Believe

by DoubleNegative



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Parentlock, Post-Season/Series 03, Prompt Fic, Song fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 11:09:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2386163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleNegative/pseuds/DoubleNegative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Mary disappears, John and his five-month-old daughter find themselves back at 221b.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reason to Believe

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tiltedsyllogism's Graceland fic challenge: one fic for every song on the album. I snagged the title track.

If anything stands out in the early months, it is the walking. Around and around, a gentle sway in his step, small soothing noises on his lips, while Violet fusses and sighs against him. Nothing for it but to keep walking, rubbing circles on her back, dropping kisses on her peach-fuzz hair. Everyone promises that the colic will pass, that she will learn to self-soothe, that eventually John will fall asleep without an infant on his chest, but until then, he walks.

With Mary gone more and more often, the nighttime wakings fall increasingly to him, a blur of nappies and warm bottles, lullabies and endless laps through the flat. He rarely bothers turning on the lights anymore, and in the silence and the dark, the world becomes dreamlike and surreal. Time moves in fits and starts. The universe contracts to the weight of the child in his arms and the path he wears in the carpet; the rest is shadow and illusion.

His work with Sherlock--reduced to almost nothing since Violet's arrival--becomes a distant memory, more like a film he’d once enjoyed than a life he’d once lived. Instead, he walks with Violet. He sleeps alone. And in between he goes to the clinic and leaves Vi with the babysitter and lets the numbing routine of it all carry him along like the tide.

And then one day in Violet’s fifth month, a black car pulls up to the kerb, and John doesn't need to climb in to know what it means. She won't be coming back.

//

“She’s gone,” Sherlock says unnecessarily when John finally appears in his doorway with a baby and a diaper bag and a single suitcase.

“As if I didn’t know that,” John snaps. And then they are both apologizing simultaneously, suddenly stumbling and awkward around each other in a way they haven’t ever been before, not even the day they met.

“Let me take that,” Sherlock says finally, bending to pull the suitcase out of John’s hand. He turns without another word and heads up the steps, and John is not quite surprised to find his old room still made up, curtains open, duvet tucked snugly over the bed. “I’m sorry there’s not a cot in yet,” Sherlock says, as though John and Violet’s unceremonious arrival on his doorstep was something he should have anticipated.

Well. Maybe it was.

“I presume you’ll need to pick up more from the house tomorrow?” Sherlock adds.

John just shakes his head. It’s all Mary’s things, mostly. Nothing left there for him but ghosts and empty sockets.

“Mycroft will take care of it, then.”

John feels as though he ought to resent this, Sherlock’s blind assurance that he’s staying, that he’s ready to pick this distantly-remembered life back up again. Instead, he finds it soothing. Here, at least, is someone who neither demands nor requires explanations: he simply knows, by the creases in John’s collar or the scrunch of Violet’s socks around her merrily kicking feet, that they are back, that they will be staying. John has nothing to explain here, nothing to defend. What a relief it is, at last.

Violet burbles at Sherlock from her perch in John’s arms, and he inclines his head towards her gravely, pressing a courtly kiss to the back of one tiny hand. “I’m delighted to see you again, Miss Violet,” he says, and she rewards him with her widest, gummiest smile. Sherlock returns it unreservedly, and John feels the cold clench between his ribs melt ever so slightly.

“Didn’t expect you’d like babies, honestly,” he says, handing Violet over to Sherlock so she can drool happily on his Italian wool while John arranges their things. “Them being members of the human race and all.”

“Ah, but unlike everyone else, babies haven’t learned to be idiots yet. They’re refreshingly straightforward. Yours is a particularly excellent specimen.”

“I’ve always thought so,” John says absently, marveling at the way Sherlock’s stance has already shifted to accommodate Violet’s enthusiastic wriggling, the gentle bounce he has added to his step to keep her content.

This might work, he realizes. Oh, there are still acres of territory that lie unexplored between them, hours of conversation still unhad--and none of Sherlock’s inexplicable charm with babies will solve the practical problems of crime-solving with an infant--but still…

John steps back to the two of them, bending to press a kiss to Violet’s downy head and letting one hand come to rest on her back, just above Sherlock’s. She coos delightedly, and the huff of fond laughter that escapes Sherlock’s lips matches John’s own.

It might work.

**Author's Note:**

> ~~more notes to follow when I'm not chasing down a deadline/up past my bedtime.~~
> 
> Okay, so. This was based on Paul Simon's "Graceland," or, well, bits of it. The song has a pretty strong narrative that I didn't want to steal outright; it felt too literal, although elements of it certainly slot in nicely with things that may or may not happen after season three. So I tried to focus on the idea of homecoming instead, in particular this bit:
> 
> _And I may be obliged to defend_  
>  Every love, every ending  
> Or maybe there’s no obligations now  
> Maybe I’ve a reason to believe  
> We all will be received  
> In Graceland
> 
> ...which also, for whatever reason, inescapably makes me think of that Robert Frost line, "‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Which is... neither here nor there, really. 
> 
> anyway, I DON'T KNOW, MAN.
> 
> So here's what I do know:
> 
> -tiltedsyllogism is lovely and inspired for running this fic challenge and prompting me to listen to quite a lot of Paul Simon.  
> -you should go read the other fics in this collection post-haste; they're excellent.  
> -I have the time management skills of goldfish and a difficult relationship with deadlines, so this is un-beta'd and un-Brit-picked.


End file.
